Use local directory instead of docker volume for n8n_data

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The difference between the named volumes and bind mounts is as follows (I hope I understand this correctly based on what I read in the docs).

When you use named volume

- n8n_storage:/home/node/.n8n

Docker creates this volume automatically if it doesn’t exist, and (what is importnat) initializes it with the contents of the target directory in the image (i.e. the contents of /home/node/.n8n inside the container). This means that the the app files that n8n expects are preserved, nothing is overwritten [1].

On the other hand, with the bind mount

- ./n8n_data:/home/node/.n8n

Docker does not copy anything into this directory - it simply overrides the container’s /home/node/.n8n folder with whatever is in your local folder, which causes node_module and all the good stuff to be missing, including the start script in package.json, and I assume this is what happens in your case [2].

The easiest way to go about this is:

  1. use named volume
  2. if you need to access to files in the volume, this is what you can do:
  3. run docker inspect n8n_n8n_storage (where n8n_n8n_storage is the name of your named volume)
  4. find the MountPoint field, this is where you can access the volume on the host machine.
$ docker volume list | grep n8n_storage
    local     n8n_n8n_storage

$ docker inspect n8n_n8n_storage | grep Mount
    "Mountpoint": "/var/lib/docker/volumes/n8n_n8n_storage/_data",

$ sudo ls /var/lib/docker/volumes/n8n_n8n_storage/_data
    binaryData  config  crash.journal  custom  git  nodes  ssh

Hope it helps.

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